Category Archives: Rittman Mead

On and off over the last year, I have spent some time developing a customisable framework for building visualisations and dashboards, using OBIEE as the back-end. The result is Insights, a JavaScript web application that offers a modern alternative to OBIEE Answers. As of today, we have officially open sourced the project, so you are free to download, install, hack and contribute as you please.

The primary motive for building this application was to meet some very bespoke reporting requirements for a client, which I mention in my previous blog describing the prototype. During this piece of work I wrote an object orientated interface for the OBIEE web services. The icing on the cake was tying it into Tom Underhill's Visual Plugin Pack.

Since then a lot of the work has been put in to make it developer friendly, visually appealing and hopefully easier to use. I'll be the first to admit that it's far from perfect, but it should be a decent starting point.

Getting Started

In order to use Insights you will need OBIEE 11.1.1.9 or above. Additionally, the application has only been tested using IE11 or Chrome browsers and so compatibility with other browsers cannot be guaranteed.

There is an installation guide in the project at docs/installation.html. Follow this guide to deploy the application on your OBIEE server.

Demo

This is a quick step-by-step demonstration creating a basic dashboard, showing off some of the features in the application (apologies if the GIFs take a while to load).

First you log in, using your usual OBIEE credentials. The homepage shows some pre-configured dashboards here, but we're going to click the pencil to create a new one.

Next I've dragged in some columns from my subject area, Sample App and run the query, displaying the default table plugin.

In this step, I've gone to the configuration tab, and changed the colour of my table.

Now I change the plugin type using the drop down menu at the top. Notice that my previous table visualisation gets stored on the right. By clicking the Store button manually, it also adds my new pie chart. Then we can flick between them easily.

Filters can be added by clicking the icon next to the column on the subject area panel.

Adding in a sunburst chart, and playing with some of the colours here.

Now we have our visualisations, we can begin constructing our dashboard. You can freely move around and resize the visualisations as you choose. I recommend hiding the panels for this, as the full screen is much closer to what users will see when viewing the dashboard.

The next GIF shows the interaction framework, which can be used to implement UI features where the user interacts with one visualisation and another visualisation on the page reacts to it. In its most basic form, each plugin type can be filtered - where OBIEE runs the query again. Although more complex reactions that are specific to a certain chart type can also be configured, as seen below with the sunburst chart.

Dashboard prompts can be added by clicking the filter icon next to one of the RPD columns. Any visualisations using this subject area will respond to the prompt. The prompt box can be freely placed on the canvas like any other object.

Finally, we can save the object to the web catalogue. This saves as a hidden analysis object in the OBIEE web catalogue and contains all of the information to recreate the dashboard when loading. All OBIEE security features are preserved, so users will only be able to access folders and reports they have permissions for.

Finished dashboards can be viewed in the application once they have been saved. The dashboard viewer will show all dashboard objects in that folder as different pages, available from the left pane. Images can be exported to PNG and PDF as well as data from the visualisations exporting to Excel and CSV.

So How Do I Learn More?

The slides that I did at UKOUG describing Insights give a comprehensive overview of the design behind the tool. You can find them here.

Summary

In a nutshell, those are the main features of the application. Feel free to try it out and have a read through the documentation (available through the application itself or offline as HTML files in the docs directory).

As an open source application there is no official support, however if you experience any bugs or have any requests for enhancements, please post them on the issue tracker.

We hope you enjoy using the app and if you would like to enlist our expertise to help you deploy and develop using this platform, feel free to contact us to discuss it further.

We have a strong innovation spirit at Rittman Mead, with all staff encouraged to use technology to its best advantage in order to do things with the software that haven't been done before. Some of these projects may may be 'scratching the itch' of a repeated manual task that should be automated. Others use technology to extend the capabilities of the tools or write new ones to fill gaps that have been identified.

At Rittman Mead we pride ourselves in our sharing of knowledge with the BI/DI community, both 'offline' at conferences and online through our blog. Today we are excited to extend this further, with the release over the next few days and weeks into open-source of some key code projects: -

insights - a javascript API/framework for building a new frontend for OBIEE, building on the OBIEE web service interface, as described here

We're very excited about opening up these projects to the community, and would be delighted to see forks and pull-requests as people build and expand on them. It should go without saying, but these are contributed 'as is'; any bugs and problems you find we will happily receive a pull request for :-)

If you would like help implementing and extending these for your own project, we would be delighted to offer services in doing so - just get in touch to find out more.

Over the next few weeks keep an eye on the blog for more information about each project, and future ones.

Have you ever wondered what the trend in movie releases has been for the past few decades? Comparing the number of Sci-Fi releases vs. Romantic Comedy releases? Me too, which is why I've taken my first look Oracle Data Visualization Desktop (DVD) to spot trends between these movie genres - Sci-Fi and the Romantic Comedy.

For this post, I found an interesting dataset from IMDB.com on Kaggle.com, listing a smattering of movies since the early 1900s from which to sort and analyze. For this example, I will contrast the number of releases between the two movie genres, looking for any possible relationship as to number of releases for both.
If you haven't installed the application yet, take a quick look at Matthew Walding's post for a good introduction. Oracle's DVD installer is fairly quick and simple, and you'll be creating visualizations in no time.

So, once the DVD application is running, we can create our first project:

Clicking "More Detail", the following screen displays the detail we can use to troubleshoot the query error:

For troubleshooting, I used the highlighted value and found the problem is with the "budget" column, which requires a datatype change from "Integer" to "Double":

The next task is to create a method of identifying a specific movie genre, however, as you can see, all genre labels for each movie are stored in a pipe-delimited value of the genres column:

So, for this demonstration, I've chosen to add a calculated column for each genre I want to analyze, locating the desired string within the pipe-delimited value under the assumption that the same value, "Sci-Fi" for instance, is recorded with the same characters in every occurrence of each pipe-delimited value.

For the first column (data element), I chose the functions LOCATE and SIGN to provide a simple logical indicator (0 and 1) that can be aggregated (summed) easily.

Click the "Validate" button to verify syntax:

The LOCATE function returns a positive integer where the expression "Sci-Fi" is located in a given string, the genres data element in this case. The SIGN function subsequently returns either a 0, 1, or -1, depending on the sign of the resulting integer from the LOCATE function. 1 (one) indicates yes, this movie release includes a Sci-Fi label for genre. 0 (zero) indicates a missing Sci-Fi label for genre, for example.

Here is the new column, appended to our existing dataset:

Next, I will create another column to identify the Romantic Comedy genre - genre_RomCom_Ind, as follows:

With the two new data columns, our dataset is expanded accordingly:

Now, it's let's create the visualizations:

Let's create a bar graph for each of our new Indicator columns, starting with the Sci-Fi genre:

We'll create a filter to include data only for title years between 1977 and 2015:

Afterward, our initial graph appears as follows, with a default aggregate summing all genre_SciFi_Ind values (0 or 1) for each title year:

Now, let's add a similar bar graph for all Romantic Comedy (genre_RomCom_Ind) releases. Notice, the same filter for title year will be applied to this new graph:

Next, I'll change the labels for each graph, providing proper context for the visualization:

We can also change the aggregate method used for the graph, when necessary:

For an added touch, let's add a trend line to the bar graph for even easier viewing:

And now, our graph appears as follows:

Applying similar modifications to our Sci-Fi Releases graph and displaying both graphs together on Canvas 1, we have the following:

Next, we'll add this Canvas to an Insight, select Narrate, and add our own description of any interesting comparisons we can identify:

In viewing the two graphs side-by-side, we notice one interesting outlier that, in year 2010, the number of Romantic Comedy releases outnumbered Sci-Fi releases by 21 movies, and on this Insight, I can enter a description (narration) beneath the graphs, highlighting this departure from the plotted trend line, as shown below. Another interesting, and unexpected, trend we see is the decreasing number of Romantic Comedy releases after 2008. But, do these two graphs display an obvious relationship, or correlation, between the two genres, either positive or negative? If we look at each trend line between 1990 and 2008, each movie genre shows an increasing number of releases, generally speaking, and leaves a somewhat inconclusive determination as to correlation, although, the periods after 2008 seem to indicate an inverse relationship.

At this point, the project can be saved (with a new title), exported, and/or printed:

In this post, I've demonstrated a basic example as an introduction to Oracle Data Visualization Desktop, with IMDB movie data, to visually quantify the number of movie releases in a given timeline, 1977 to 2015, creating custom calculations and dynamic visualizations for our particular measures.

One note I would add is that I did not attempt to eliminate any overlapping indicators, which were minimal, in the newly-added columns, genre_Sci-Fi_Ind and genre_RomCom_Ind. Although, it is possible that a movie can be labeled as all three - Sci-Fi, Romance, and Comedy, it did not distort the overall trend. And, these graphs now create a question - Can we know what influences the release of Sci-Fi movies and their increasing popularity? Are Romantic Comedy movies truly decreasing in popularity or is the movie studios choice to decrease the number of RomCom releases because of the surge in Sci-Fi releases? We all understand limitations of all studios investment capital, but must the RomCom genre suffer because of the Sci-Fi genre? If so, why? I realize this is a simplified view of the trend, but does lend itself to more scrutiny among other genres as well.

Rittman Mead is happy to announce that its much anticipated On Demand Training (ODT) service is live, giving people the opportunity to receive expertly written & delivered self-paced training courses that can be accessed online anywhere, at anytime.

We have been delivering technical & end-user courses based on Oracle Analytics products all over the world for the past decade.

While our classroom sessions continue to offer an unrivalled experience for our trainees, we understand that in the modern era, flexibility is important.

ODT has been built based on the feedback of our clients and network so that you can:

Experience our training regardless of the distance to travel

Keep your member’s of staff on site at crucial periods in your company’s calendar

Rittman Mead has always had a long standing commitment to giving back, not only to the technology industry, but to local and global communities as well. Recently, Rittman Mead employees have been encouraged to take up to 40 paid hours to participate in community service opportunities. This year, I chose to use my 40 hours to serve at an orphanage in the Dong Nai province of Vietnam. The Bien Hoa Center for Supporting and Vocational Training is an orphanage that currently serves 53 children, ranging in age from infants to 16 year olds.

Additionally, the Bien Hoa Center was home to my recently adopted son for over 7 years. So this was a place near and dear to my heart. The orphanage is run by a very attentive staff, who do a great job caring for the kids, despite having very limited resources. Many of the children are learning english and other useful skills that will serve them well once they leave the orphanage, either through aging out of the program or through adoption. While we were there, my family and I were able to play with the older children and comfort the babies. It was a pleasure to see them display such beautiful, wide smiles despite their difficult situations.
We were also able to deliver a gift donated by many of my generous Rittman Mead colleagues, which included over 60lbs of art supplies, candy and toys. Despite our consultants being separated across many states, once I posted an opportunity to contribute, gifts just started arriving at our Atlanta office, where I hang my laptop bag.

It is truly a pleasure working with such compassionate people and having a management team that values more than just profits. Caring about the causes that are important to employees is a big part of the Rittman Mead culture. This attitude, coupled with numerous family friendly work events, makes employees feel like more than simply a cog in the wheels of a profit machine. At Rittman Mead, employees are supported in their pursuit of a healthy work-life balance and that is one of the big reasons I am proud to work here.